There is an increasing need to automatically monitor a mobile device user's location and other behavior, understand the user's habits and interests, and provide intelligent personal assistance to the user based on the user's habits and interests obtained through location based behavior analysis. Presently, location based services include manual check-ins. For a manual check-in, the user opens an application on their mobile device manually, and indicates that they are at a specific business.
Additionally, location-based searches are manual. That is, the user conducts a search of some business using keyword, such as “restaurant”, and the application returns results that are the closest to the user's current location.
Other location-based service includes mobile social applications wherein, for example, friends are shown on a map. However, that services and applications are limited because they can't accurately determine the point of the interest the user is at, hard to disambiguate between multiple points of interest near each other. Generally, current local business or POI search is only using the spatial data as input, which does not generally provide enough information to accurately determine the point of interest.
It is desirable to have a method, apparatus and system for monitoring a mobile user's location and providing useful applications to the user based on location-based user behavior analysis.